High-capacity adaptive steganography based on LSB and Hamming code

Abstract The development of the Internet provides the ability to transfer large amounts of data quickly and easily. However, sensitive data is easily intercepted by hackers on the Internet. Image steganography ensures the secure transmission of information. In order to improve the capacity of hidden secret data and provide imperceptible hidden image quality, this paper proposes a hybrid steganography method based on least significant bit (LSB) replacement and Hamming code (HLAH). Information security is also increased by using two different steganographic methods. Since the sharp areas of the image can tolerate more changes than the smooth areas, more secret messages are embedded in the edge regions of the image and a small amount of information are embedded in the smooth regions. Finally, the performance of the proposed HLAH method is evaluated by measuring payload capacity, mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and histogram analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed HLAH method not only has greater embedding capacity than other existing methods, but also ensures higher image quality.